I know I'm late to the party, but the better way to write this is always to put the constant first:

if (1 == i) {

...so that if you forget to use '==' it will cause a syntax error.

Not a chemist, but I really appreciate this blog about chemicals that seem crazy-dangerous:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/

The oldest hard drive I'm still actively using holds patches and sample data in a keyboard--a little 200MB SCSI drive. I think it may eventually outlive the keyboard itself. At one point in time, the keyboard itself also had the largest RAM of any computer I owned, at a whopping 64MB. When I was driving it back and forth from college, the keyboard was insured for more than the car it was in.

This comment reminded me of Derek Lowe's chemistry blog, Things I Won't Work With.

You'd need to be sufficiently stupid to want one of these, and almost recklessly negligent to sell them without vetting the customers thoroughly.

Any thread on SSD failures should include a link to Jeff Atwood's blog entry on the topic:

I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.

Full post here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

Knuth's Volume 4 only got 9/10 recently, obviously because it is soooooooo wordy.

In base Pi, the last digit of Pi is 0. Easy.

I'm waiting for the day when some nutjob fashions a piece of doggie-poo looking substance out of brown-painted C4 with an embedded motion-sensitive detonator.

There, I've said it. Let everyone be scared of any stray pile of poop laying on a city sidewalk. Perhaps then, when we try to ban dogs completely, people may wake up and see that it's just not worth going through life terrified of everything.

Ugh.

While I found Russian Ark technically fascinating, it was otherwise very difficult to sit through because the viewer becomes aware early on that they are watching a visual gimmick unfold. Instead of paying attention to the plot, I was distracted by the single-shot nature of it, and how they were going to pull it off.

I'd liken this to experiments like Timecode which use similar gimmicks and long shots, but are otherwise slightly awkward to view.

No it's not, since it will eventually degenerate into an fully connected graph. Just find one on Wikipedia or Wolfram, and link to that picture instead.

Billy Joel has, since a very early time in his career, a registered trademark on his name for the purpose of music. I'm pretty sure he's not going around suing parents who have the audacity to name their kids William Joel, however.

Look at the album cover of "Billy Joel (R) Greatest Hits" for an example.

I seem to have had excellent luck with durability of the systems I integrate. Either that, or I'm hanging on to computers that are way too old... I've had to replace a CMOS backup battery button-cell in an old Gateway laptop and a Shuttle SFF system last year. My kids still use them to play old DOS games.

asplode: what your head looks like after going through an asplundh

If computers were considered "the revenge of the nerds", I'm curious what the next few years will be called.

Obviously, Revenge of the Nerds II - Nerds in Paradise.

This reminds me of an old joke about a retired Admiral who is responsible for sounding the morning cannon at the naval base, walking past a watchmaker's shop every morning and setting his pocketwatch to the correct time from a reliable old grandfather clock in the store window.

One day, on the walk in, he happens to see the watchmaker cleaning the store windows and mentions how he finds it amazing that the old grandfather clock keeps such flawless time.

"Oh, that old thing?" says the watchmaker. "It drifts horribly, and I have to reset it almost daily."

The Admiral then asks, "Since I've always noticed that it's reliable, from where do you get the time to set it?"

The watchmaker replied, "I use the report from the morning cannon at the naval base. It's always right on time."